A&E: Home on the range - with harps!

A band with South American roots plays music rarely heard in the United States

Oct. 4, 2013

Karin Stein, second from the right, founded Los Llaneros to re-create the music of her native Colombia. The group's array of instruments includes a four-stringed guitar, called a cuatro (far left), and a donkey-jaw clacker, known as a quijada (center). / Special to the Register

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Los Llaneros

FIRST STOP: With the Iowa Youth Chorus and singers from McKinley Elementary School at 3:30 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 13, at the Central Campus auditorium, 1800 Grand Ave., $10. www.cultureall.orgNEXT STOP: 7:30 p.m. Oct. 15 at Grinnell College’s Herrick Chapel in Grinnell. Free, but tickets are required. Pick them up starting at noon Friday at the college’s Bucksbaum Center for the Arts or the Pioneer Bookshop in downtown Grinnell. www.grinnell.edu

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W hen Karin Stein was a farm girl in Colombia, she heard cows every morning outside her bedroom window. She heard the clink-clank of milk pails, and the farmhands who would whistle or sing to soothe the cows while their calves were away.

“They swore the cows gave more milk that way,” she said.

At the end of the day, the guys sang the sun down with a small four-stringed guitar, called a cuatro.

Stein grew up with those sounds and missed them when she moved to Costa Rica, for high school, and then to Iowa for college, where she studied at Grinnell and Iowa State. She got a master’s in agronomy but never used it, choosing instead to re-create the music she remembered from the Llanos, the Colombian and Venezuelan plains.

In 1978 she founded the group Los Llaneros — “the people of the Llanos” — has been performing ever since. Their style is rarely heard in the United States outside a few neighborhoods in Miami.

But even unitiated ears tend to like it, Stein said. “A lot of it is very upbeat, very happy. I think it resonates with everybody who listens to it, regardless of their cultural background.”

The group’s sound starts with rhythm — usually drums and maracas — and then builds a melody with the cuatro, which can be plucked fast like a bluegrass banjo. They also use flutes and donkey-jawbone clackers and the harp.

Wait a sec — the harp? Since when did cowboys ever lug around a harp? (There was an old cartoon from “The Far Side” where two cowboys sat around a campfire, and one of them has a grand piano sticking out of his back pocket. “Hey, Cookie,” the other guy says, “Why don’t you pull that out and play us a tune?”)

Stein can explain. “The four of us, we could play llanero music for two days straight and be perfectly happy, but a U.S. audience would get bored. So a lot of the instruments are used when we play songs from the coasts or the Andes Mountains.”

She likes the variety, but for her, there’s nothing quite like her home on the range. The songs about nature are still her favorites. She laughed. “This sounds funny to say, but a song about a newborn calf can really warm my heart.”